Earlier this week I was held ransom by Gmail ! I, like so many other SMB’s have put my trust in Gmail over other email packages like Outlook, but for several hours I could not access Gmail & today I am experiencing issues with Gmail – why do I suggest ransom, well it is a word that suggests being held back against one’s will, in this case my will to do my work.

But what position do you have when Google offers Gmail for Free ? How are other service offerings from the likes of Salesforce.com with CRM – addressing this outage issue ?

This timely report from The Wall Street Journal might help… and then again maybe it won’t – either paid of unpaid an outage of service is to be expected and accepted ?

Gmail glitch shows pitfalls of online software

Latest outage wiped out email service for two and half hours.

When Google Inc.’s online-email service shut off for over two hours earlier this week, it brought to light concerns about whether businesses can safely rely on software that their employees access over the Internet.

Online software services like Google’s Gmail — which run on vast computer farms managed by companies like Google and Salesforce.com Inc., rather than businesses installing and operating the software themselves — are a bright spot for the technology sector: Sales grew 27% in 2008 to $6.4 billion, according to research company Gartner. Such services are also often cheaper to operate and easier to get started on, making them attractive options during a recession.

Google’s Gmail is one of the most widely-used pieces of online software. Most users are familiar with the free version. Google also sells a suite of online-software services, including an advanced version of Gmail, to companies for $50 a year per user account.

But companies are finding that going online to do business-computing tasks via services like Google’s or similar ones offered by Amazon.com Inc. and Salesforce.com, among others, comes with a risk: When something goes wrong, customers must sit idly while waiting for someone else to fix the problem.

“Any time there is a failure it creates concern,” said John Dohm, vice president of information technology at True Religion Apparel Inc.

In early February, the online warehouse-management system that True Religion uses was unavailable for two hours, making it impossible for the Vernon, Calif., company to fill orders.”There was nothing I could do about it,” said Mr. Dohm.

The latest Gmail outage, which wiped out the service for two and a half hours beginning at 4:30 a.m. EST Monday morning, was caused by some new software having the unexpected side effect of triggering a bug in the Gmail code, which caused a data center to become overloaded when users were directed to it, said Dave Girouard, president of Google’s enterprise division, in an interview Wednesday.